Report: How much money social media sites can make you

October 14, 2010 8:00 AMRiley McDermid

How much money is doing business through social media sites really making you? According to a new report released today on “social commerce,” a lot.

New data compiled by online ticket seller Eventbrite showed that across all social channels, there was a clear gain in dollar amount every time a consumer “shared” news about one of the firm’s events — data that has a direct corollary to any company using social media as a way to advance its brand.

For the report, Eventbrite tracked all ticket sales driven by sharing through each social channel and then divided that number by the total number of shares initiated through that channel via the Eventbrite platform to find sharing results in real dollars.

The dollar gain was clear, with the most recent data showing that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through an “email friends” application equals $2.34.

”We are really excited to see what people have to say about this report,” Eventbrite co-founder and president Julia Hartz told VentureBeat. “We don’t know who has been tracking this data yet or at what level, so we’re just waiting to see what other social commerce [data] users have to add.”

The report also showed that “stickiness is an important measure of relevancy,” because the hyper-relevancy of the social group measured breeds deeper engagement, greater sales and stickier audiences.

Eventbrite found that in its case, Facebook is now the number one referring site for traffic to the company’s site, surpassing Google, with each Facebook share driving 11 visits back to Eventbrite.com. Averaged across all social media channels measured, one share drove over seven visits back to Eventbrite.com.

“It shows us how relevant shared event content is [to] an individual’s social graph,” said Hartz. “Maintaining this stickiness is key to Eventbrite’s growth — as more and more people share the events that they are excited about, growth scales exponentially if you maintain relevancy.”

Eventbrite said it built its social analytics tools out over a series of months and continues to refine and add to them.

“The analytics tools that track sharing are only a subset of our total analytics that give us visibility into high level trends that are impacting our business and enable us to capitalize on opportunities early on,” said Hartz.

“For example, we saw that more and more traffic and sales were being driven by Facebook. People were literally cutting and pasting links into Facebook to share them with their friends,” she said. “This showed us that there was a huge opportunity to make this sharing more friction-free and was the reason that we implemented Facebook Connect so early on.”